OSI
's OSI identification]] The Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) is a semi-secret organization under the direction of Oscar Goldman and through which Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers perform operative duties. Mandate headquarters as seen in ]] A division of the United States Department of State and therefore within the purview of its Secretary, ( , ) the OSI's activities primarily center around the creation and protection of new technologies vital to national defense. It has occasionally sent agents on more traditional diplomatic details, especially when those missions would benefit from the unique technologies it has developed. Rarely, the OSI has been used as the lead Federal agency on fairly ordinary domestic crises. ( ) The organization's mandate is thus a flexible one, requiring good working relationships with other departments within the executive branch of the US Government. In particular, it maintains a strong relationship with the Department of Defense, by whom many of its technological innovations are used. Locations The organization is headquartered in Washington, DC, home to Oscar's office. Rudy has a known lab in Colorado Springs, Colarado, at which both Steve and Jaime recuperated soon after their bionic replacement surgeries. ). He has additional laboratories at the Washington headquarters. ( ). Additional branch offices seem to be implied to exist in Los Angeles, California by various episodes of The Bionic Woman. Deconstructed Naming controversy The full name for which OSI is the acronym has been the source of some confusion throughout the runs of The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, and their associated spin-off materials. Television The overwhelmingly dominant name used in televised (and audio) stories is Office of Scientific Intelligence. This was seen on props (like agent identification cards) and sets (such as the outer glass door to Oscar's office) in many episodes, including , and the "Kill Oscar" trilogy. However, other names have occasionally cropped up. The single most consistent alternative is Office of Scientific ''Information. This was used throughout the reunion movies. Given the the movies were set several years after the final events of the series, it's entirely possible to believe that this suggests the '''Office of Scientific Intelligence', like many government agencies, got a name change in the intervening years. Other in-story variations are not so easy to explain, largely because they happened only once and are sandwiched between other stories that revert back to Office of Scientific Intelligence. These are potentially best explained as production errors: :* Office of Scientific Investigation ( ) :* Office of Strategic Investigation Beyond television Charlton Comics In addition to the filmed content of the series, spin-off material has provided a variety of different theories as to what "OSI" stands for. Perhaps the biggest source of variation can be found in Charlton's ''The Six Million Dollar Man'' and ''The Bionic Woman'' comic books. Within the space of just 14 total issues, no fewer than three different names were used, mostly within the confines of the illustrated text stories at the back of the issues. The most-used name in the comic books was Office of Strategic Intelligence. This name appeared once in the context of the main comic story, "Rico, Come Home!" in the first issue of The Bionic Woman. Since the two books otherwise stuck to the acronym in their comic stories, this meant that, technically, the story offered the only name officially established in the Charlton comics continuity.It is currently unknown whether the comics of ''The Six Million Dollar Man'' magazine ever fully defined "OSI". Additionally, this name also appeared in the Jaime Sommers fact sheet at the back of the same issue, and in the illustrated text story, "Forbidden Reef" from issue #3 of The Six Million Dollar Man. However, it is unclear how exactly to perceive Charlton's attachment to the name, given other illustrated text stories. "Win a Few" in issue #2 of The Six Million Dollar Man used the series' most common variant, Office of Scientific Intelligence, while "No Way Out" from issue #1, and "The Ransom" from issue #4 told readers the name was actually, Office of ''Strategic Information. Other Products Perhaps taking its cue from , the back of the Region 2 ''Bionic Woman season one DVD packaging gives a plural variant, Office of ''Scientific Investigations. Several novelizations based upon the two series use the variant "Office of ''Stategic Intelligence'', such as Eileen Lottman's Welcome Home, Jaime. ---- The OS'O' In the Martin Caidin series of Cyborg novels, the organization to which Steve Austin owes his recovery was the OSO, or Office of Strategic Operations. The acronym was maintained for the pilot but replaced with OSI in Steve's next TV adventure, Wine, Women and War. Later, when the pilot was prepared for syndication, it was padded with scenes from other episodes to create the two-parter, "The Moon and the Desert." Because some of those scenes contained reference to OSI, a discontinuity was introduced. Fans' conjecture for this syndicated anomaly, have included a theory that the OSO is actually a subdivision of the OSI. Others speculate that the producers' intent was to recon the OSO out of the narrative, by way of an agency name change heralded by the arrival of Oscar Goldman taking over for Oliver Spencer as Steve's "boss." [[The Six Million Dollar Man (Look-in strips)|Steve's adventures in the British Look-in comic strips]] retain OSO in many adventures. However, [[The Bionic Woman (Look-in strips)|Look-in's Bionic Woman]] reference OSO in its first story only, while the rest frequently proclaim that she works for the OSI. Intriguingly, there appears to be a real OSO within the US intelligence community. The Operational Support Office is part of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and is apparently responsible for broadcasting data to military units.http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/gbs.htm However, it's doubtful that awareness of the real OSO prompted the in-series name change, since the NRO's existence remained secret until 1992.http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB35/ ---- Real World The specific building used for the Washington location is the real-life Russell Senate Office Building. However, neither series positively identifies the building as anything other than the OSI headquarters. It is thus possible that in the world of the bionic series, Senate office space is located elsewhere — especially as it makes little real-world sense why a division of the executive branch would be housed in a building maintained by the legislative branch. The OSI is not, as some viewers might assume, an analogue for the CIA. Unlike the Director of Central Intelligence, Oscar is clearly the subordinate of a Cabinet Secretary, as evidenced by episodes like and . The closest real-life analogue to the OSI would probably be the extremely short-lived Interim Research and Intelligence Service. This subdivision of the State Department was the result of the devolution of the functionality of the OSS to the Departments of War and State in the immediate aftermath of World War II. By 1946, these functions would be again removed from War and State and reconstituted into the newly-formed CIA. Indeed the fact that the CIA arose out of the efforts of Truman's Secretary of State James Byrnes Richelson, Jeffery T. A Century of Spies. Oxford University Press (US). 1995. 216. may also be seen as a possible reason that the fictional OSI is a part of the Department of State. Reference Category:Government institutions Category:US Government facilities